The Pandemic Response Box Accelerating Drug Discovery Efforts after Disease Outbreaks br

The current Covid-19 pandemic has underlined the need for amore coordinated and forward-looking investment in the search for newmedicines targeting emerging health care threats. Repositioning currentlyapproved drugs is a popular approach to any new emerging disease, but itrepresents afirst wave of response. Behind this would be a second wave of morespecifically designed therapies based on activities against specific moleculartargets or in phenotypic assays. Following the successful deployment and uptakeof previous open access compound collections, we assembled the PandemicResponse Box, a collection of 400 compounds to facilitate drug discovery inemerging infectious disease. These are based on public domain information onchemotypes currently in discovery and early development which have beenshown to have useful activities and were prioritized by medicinal chemistryexperts. They are freely available to the community as a pharmacological test setwith the understanding that data will be shared rapidly in the public domain.